Encyclopedia of

Tibetan Book of the Dead

Since its first English translation in 1927, the Tibetan guide to
spiritual and mental liberation called the
Bardo Thodol
has been known in the West as the Tibetan
Book of the Dead.
The book has reappeared in several English-language versions since then,
some based only loosely on the original. The text has thus lived several
lives in English alone, appearing to be reborn time and again before new
audiences, often with varying titles and content. Yet these recent lives
are part of a much older cycle of rebirths. The original is believed to
have been composed in the eighth century
C.E.
by the great master Padma Sambhava, then hidden away by its author for
the salvation of future generations. The text was rediscovered six
centuries later by Karma Lingpa, believed by some to be an incarnation of
Padma Sambhava himself. Since the fourteenth century C.E. the text has
occupied a central place in Tibetan Buddhism, giving birth to a large
number of parallel, supplementary, and derivative texts.

W. Y. Evans-Wentz coined the English title for the 1927 edition on the
basis of analogies he perceived with the Egyptian funerary text
The Book of Coming Forth By Day,
known in the West as the Egyptian
Book of the Dead.
Both the Tibetan and Egyptian
Books
discuss death and its aftermath. Yet their views of death are
sufficiently different from
the Judeo-Christian tradition that the English titles are quite
misleading.

This is particularly so in the case of the Tibetan
Book of the Dead.
The Tibetan title,
Bardo Thodol,
does not refer to death as such.
Thodol
means "liberation through understanding."
Bardo
means a "between state," an interval or transition between
two mental states, whether experienced in life or after death. Hence the
work's Tibetan title (which might be translated more literally as
Liberation through Understanding the Between
) alludes to bardo states that may be experienced at any point over the
cycle of life, death and rebirth, yet the work itself overtly discusses
only the bardo states experienced during death, offering explicit
instruction on how to navigate them.

It is difficult to appreciate the significance of the work's overt
content without a sense of its larger cultural context. The
Bardo Thodol
presupposes a cosmology of human experience in which existence is viewed
as inherently fluid and impermanent, as involving a series of stages, of
which death is merely one. The mind or soul continues to live after death,
undergoing a series of experiences before rebirth. Human beings are
believed to be able to guide themselves through the entire cycle by
creating a more focused self-awareness through their powers of
concentration, augmented, ideally, by means of meditation. The chief
utility of meditation during life, or of the
Bardo Thodol
at the time of dying, lies in making the mind lucid enough to control its
own passage over the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The larger goal of
these practices is to seek liberation from the suffering associated with
this cycle, both for oneself and for others.

The Bardo States

Six main bardo experiences are distinguished in Tibetan Buddhism: Three
are encountered during life and three are encountered after death. A
single life span is itself a bardo state, a transitional zone in a larger
cycle of rebirths. Dreams are bardo states that occur within the daily
round, in the interval between falling asleep and waking; feelings of
uncertainty, paranoia, and delusion are sometimes grouped with dreams on a
looser interpretation of this second bardo state. A meditative trance is a
third type of bardo state, an intermediate zone between ordinary
consciousness and enlightened awareness. These are the main bardo states
of life.

Death involves bardo states as well. On the Tibetan view, death is not an
instantaneous event but a process taking several days, involving a
successive dissociation of mind from body, which is manifested in
characteristic outward signs. During this process, the conscious mind
experiences three main bardo states.

The first of these, called the
Chikai Bardo,
is the experience of the death point, the moment at which the soul loses
consciousness of objects and becomes aware only of itself. The experience
is described as a vivid formless light emanating from all sides. At this
moment, enlightenment lies close at hand, although one's capacity
to attain it depends on the extent to which one has achieved lucidity and
detachment in one's previous existence. For most individuals the
vision of light can only be sustained for a brief interval, after which
the soul, caught in desire and delusion, regresses toward lower levels of
existence.

In the second state, called the
Chonyid Bardo,
the soul has visions involving a succession of deities: a series of
beatific Buddhas in the first seven days, a series of terrifying deities
in the next seven. The text describes these visions as projections of the
mind's own consciousness, often involving a tension within the mind
itself. For example, the dazzling visions of the beatific deities are
accompanied by duller visions of other beings that distract from the
splendor of the former. To be thus distracted is to give in to anger,
terror, pride, egotism, jealousy, and other weaknesses. In contrast, to
ignore the minor visions and to embrace the more awe-inspiring deities is
to attain spiritual salvation through the very act.

A mind that fails to overcome these weaknesses encounters the darker, more
horrific deities of the latter seven days. Many of these visions are
merely aspects of the Buddhas encountered in the first seven days, now
made terrifying by the mind's own weakness. Liberation is still
possible here simply by recognizing these beings for who they are. Yet the
act is also more difficult now because terror forces the mind to flee
rather than to examine its experiences.

A mind that has failed to free itself by this point enters the
Sidpa Bardo,
the third, most desperate stage. Here the mind faces a host of
hallucinations, including visions of pursuit by demons and furies, of
being devoured and hacked to
pieces. A mind may linger here for many weeks—up to the
forty-ninth day after death—depending on the faculties of the
particular individual.

These experiences culminate in rebirth in some sentient form. Whether one
is reborn as human or animal, or is relegated for a time to one of the
many Tibetan hells, or whether one achieves liberation from the entire
cycle of life and rebirth, thus attaining Buddahood, depends on
one's success in overcoming weakness over the course of the cycle.

Although the
Bardo Thodol
is a guide to the bardo states experienced after death, it can only be
read by the living. It may be read in preparation for one's own
death, or at the deathbed of another. Because the weaknesses attributed to
the dead are all experienced by the living as well, a person learning to
traverse the bardo states of death will learn to navigate better the bardo
experiences of life as well. In this sense the book is a guide to
liberation across the entire cycle of human existence as conceived in
Tibetan Buddhism.

Bibliography

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., ed.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or he After-Death Experiences on the Bardo
Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering.
1927. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Fremantle, Francesca, and Chögyam Trungpa.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in
the Bardo, by Guru Rinpoche according to Karma Lingpa.
Berkeley, CA: Shambala Press, 1975.